Real Estate
FSBO, as it’s known in the industry, can save sellers thousands in broker fees, but it’s a complicated task
If you’re planning to sell your home, one of the first decisions you’ll have to make is whether to work with a real estate agent or try to sell on your own — a process commonly referred to in the industry as FSBO, “For Sale By Owner.”
If you’re successful on your own, you can save tens of thousands of dollars you would have otherwise paid as a real estate commission — a fee that is often 6 percent of the sales price.
While it’s tempting to try to avoid paying the commission, the process of selling a home is complicated and time-consuming, so you have to weigh things like the value of your time and the chances you may make a mistake that blows your deal against the prospective savings.
According to the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, only 5 percent of homes sold over the past few years were FSBO transactions — a record low. And the number of home sellers using real estate agents hit a record high, with 91 percent of homes sold with the assistance of an agent.
“It’s a lot more difficult to sell a house in today’s market than it was in 2021, when the interest rates were better and it was a seller’s market,” said Morgan Franklin, an agent with Coldwell Banker Realty in Boston. “It’s more complicated, whether you’re considering how commissions break down or how you market a house; today, we’re using AI and virtual staging.”
There are other reasons why you may want to consider an agent. According to NAR (bear in mind this is a trade organization for real estate agents), the median price for an FSBO sale was $360,000, while agent-assisted sales had a median sales price of $425,000. That difference may more than make up for the commission.
Joe Picard, a 71-year-old longshoreman in Quincy, has sold 11 investment properties on his own; those deals all happened in the 1980s and ‘90s. “Nowadays, there’s a lot more involved,” he said. “It’s more complicated.” The properties he sold then were all new construction, which he says made the transactions easier — he even wrote his own contracts and only got a lawyer involved for closing.
In 2019, he placed an ad in the newspaper seeking $875,000 for a three-family house in East Boston, a rehab. Franklin called him, and after touring the eight-bedroom property, suggested a listing price of $919,000. Picard decided to list with the agent. Within a week, the property was under contract, receiving three offers and ultimately selling in March 2019 for $975,000, $56,000 over the asking price and a whopping $100,000 over what Picard originally was looking to get.
“The transaction was much less work for me … I sat back and didn’t have to do anything this time,” said Picard. “Now I’m too old to fool around, so I’d probably use a real estate agent again.”
If you believe you can sell on your own, it doesn’t hurt to give it a shot. Just set a time limit for yourself, and price the property carefully after reviewing comparable sales in your neighborhood. Make sure you have an attorney you can call with questions — they will likely prepare the sales contract and handle the closing anyway. But bear in mind that a lot can happen between the initial phone call from an interested buyer and the closing table.
“A lot of people think they just need to list a house on Zillow, and that someone will call them and they’ll get to the closing table,” said Franklin. “They don’t realize that a lot of deals fall out of escrow that could have been saved with the right person managing the deal.”
“An agent’s job isn’t just to sell the house and then check out when it goes under contract,” he added. “It’s to smoothly manage the deal, from offer-accepted to closing. If you don’t have someone there acting on your behalf, there are a lot of things that can fall through the cracks.”
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